Page 20 of The Lady and the Secret Lord (The Duke’s Men #3)

R obin reached his office just after first light. A needling wind blew away the storm and scoured the sky of fog and soot. The river, roiled and muddy, churned below the soggy, leaf-strewn yard. He was glad to duck into the office and get a fire going. At his desk he found a message from one of Moody’s trainers that an unlicensed shoeshine boy matched the sketch Robin had shown them. It was the break he needed. The boy was small and ragged and good at scarpering whenever a copper appeared. No doubt Tanner had been obvious in his inquiries, and easy to avoid. Robin, too, would be spotted as a policeman. Impatient as he was to find Andrew and move him to safety, he needed a way to gain the boy’s trust.

He took his time staring at the evidence on his desk, looking at each item and reconstructing the events of the case. He fingered the bit of torn black lace from her veil. He should have kissed her when he’d had the chance. Then the old Roman coin caught his eye. It linked the boy and Phoebe and the messenger. It was the coin that had convinced Phoebe that her brother was alive. Robin took it up to look more closely. It had been altered in more than one way. In addition to the hole for the leather thong. Someone, perhaps the dead Lord Grafton, had marked the coin with tiny scratches that looked like Roman numbers, a fifty, and a second, less-distinct number.

He pocketed the coin and headed to the spot in Soho, where Leary claimed to have sent Andrew Marchmont on his way with a pawn ticket. As Robin hunched forward into the cold wind, memories came on strong. A small herd of cattle passed him, headed for the slaughterhouse on Marshall Street. Night soil men headed out of the city with their reeking wagon. A costermonger’s turnip cart splashed through shining puddles. He was a careful vendor. Nothing dropped from his cart. As boys, they would have pounced on anything that fell from such a cart. He let himself think back to the time when the streets looked different, when he was hungry and no taller than the bottom of a shop window. Smells had been sharper. A piece of cake in a bake shop window could hold a boy captive more completely than any copper. The thought made him stop and buy a piece of heavy, dark cake with currants, smelling of cinnamon and burnt sugar. Inevitably, he glanced at the roof line opposite, looking for access, and for places where boys could shelter from the wind or the police, if it came to that.

At Hayward’s, men lined up to pawn tools they would not need again until Monday. When Robin’s turn came and he asked about the shoeshine boy, the clerk declared that he was no peach. Robin pointed out that a pawnbroker would do well to help the police with their inquiries. “The boy is not wanted by the police, but by his sister.”

“Can’t be the boy I’m thinking of. ’e ’as a sister, name of Agnes.” The clerk tried to look around Robin to the next man in line.

“Tell me about her,” Robin insisted.

“Skinny, dark-haired, fierce, wears man’s boots.”

The description fit the description of the messenger who brought Phoebe the coin. “Do they have a room anywhere? A doss-house they frequent?”

“Agnes cleans for the landlord at the Green Man. Ask ’im. And keep goin’. Yer making me customers nervous.”

From Hayward’s, Robin set up a pattern like a beat cop, moving in ever-wider circles at a steady pace, covering the area between the pawn shop and the Green Man. Outside a chandler’s shop two streets away he spotted a boy leaning against the outer wall, calling out to customers. He had a mop of light-brown hair under a green plaid cap, blue eyes, and cheeks reddened and chapped with cold. A drab coat covered most of a white shirt, grayed and wrinkled with wear and closed with a single button. A suspender strap held a pair of dark brown wool trousers up over his skinny frame. A brush protruded from one coat pocket, and at his side was a box with a Carr’s Blacking label on it. The boy kept out of sight of the shop window. Robin passed on the opposite side of the street, listening to the cry of Clean your boots, sir?

A man stopped and tossed a coin to the boy, who caught it and sprang into action, pulling a tin of blacking and a rag from the box. But as the man lifted his foot to place it on the footrest, the beat cop came round the corner.

“Hook it, boy,” the copper shouted, striding forward. “Or I’ll toss yer box, fer ye.”

The boy snatched up his box, slung it over his shoulder, and ran, the box banging against his back. The man who’d given up his coin turned on the cop, who defended his action as a duty to break up the illegal practice of shining shoes without a license.

Robin kept his gaze on the fleeing boy, marking where he disappeared between two buildings. The alley led to a closed court with no exit, and no sign of the boy. The place reeked of overflowing cesspools. Planks made crossings over the muck, and wooden stairs climbed the dark sides of the buildings. There was no sign of the boy, and Robin thought he might have simply vanished until an upper-story door opened onto the stairs, drawing Robin’s glance upward. A girl tossed a bucket of muck into the yard, aiming for a tub at the base of the stairs and mostly hitting it, but what Robin saw, and it made him laugh, was the boy’s escape route. In a dark corner of the court, recessed windows on either side of a lead drain pipe made a ladder to the roof. It was a climb any lost boy could make in minutes. He didn’t hesitate.

The rooftop world spread out before him with its ledges and slopes, rails and cornices, its pointed dormers, soot-blackened bricks, and shining slates. Chimney stacks rose like stands of terra-cotta trees releasing streaming plumes of smoke into the bright air. A long, continuous uneven surface like a rocky moor stretched before him over which a boy could clamber near half a mile unseen above the streets below. He found the shoeshine boy pressed against the bricks under a stand of round chimney pots. It was a smart place to huddle where the warmth from the flues radiated out to the brick surround. Between Robin and the boy, wet slates gleamed in the sunlight.

“How did you find me?” the boy asked.

“I used to live on rooftops.”

“Hah!” he said, plainly disbelieving. “Don’t come near.”

Robin squatted down, leaving a good ten feet between them. “I have something of yours. Agnes brought it to your sister, to Phoebe.” Robin held out his hand with the coin nestled in his palm. A beam of sunlight touched it and made it gleam.

The boy’s eyes widened. He stared wistfully at the coin, balled his hands into fists, and tucked them into his armpits. “Agnes is my sister,” he insisted.

Robin kept his palm extended, but changed the topic. “I’m a policeman, you know.”

The boy gave him a quick dismissive glance and shook his head. “Your clothes are wrong. You don’t have whiskers.”

“I’m a new kind of policeman.”

“I know all the coppers here. You aren’t one of them. Coppers chase us from our corners and throw our boxes in the street.”

“Do you know Constable Trigg? He never threw your box into the street.”

There was a small stubborn shake of the head and another sly glance at the coin.

“He could be your friend,” Robin suggested.

“Agnes is my friend. I help her. We keep away from the bad men.”

“Are bad men after Agnes?”

The boy nodded.

“And you?” The boy didn’t answer.

The sharp breeze ruffled Robin’s hair. “I’ll tell you what kind of policeman I am. People come to me for help when there’s a mystery or a puzzle, or when bad men try to hurt someone. Your sister Phoebe came to me. She brought me this coin. Did your father give it to you?”

“She’s Lady Phoebe. If you’re a real policeman, you have to call her that.”

It was a slight slip and a barb. Nothing like a child’s frankness to let one know one’s place in the world. Robin flipped the coin over in his palm. “Did your father make these marks on the coin? Do you know what they mean? I can’t make them out.”

The boy looked at it, longing in those changeable blue eyes so like his sister’s. “It’s a secret.”

“Ah,” said Robin. “One your father told you.”

“He told me it was my mother’s secret, and that made him sad because she died.”

Robin judged it time to produce the cake from his pocket. It was a risk. He would have to put the coin away or put it down. The boy could bolt, and a chase across the rooftops could push him to take dangerous chances. Now that Robin had found him, he wanted only to get him back to his sister.

Robin seated himself on the ridge tiles, and set the coin on the slate next to him. Then he pulled the cake from his pocket. It was wrapped in brown paper to which the cake’s moist bottom stuck. As a boy, he would have licked the wrapper clean of crumbs.

He took his time peeling away the paper. “Lady Phoebe is sad the way your father was sad. She misses you.”

“She can’t.” The boy watched the cake as it emerged from the brown wrapping. A year in the streets had thinned the face from Phoebe’s handbill.

“Why can’t she?” Their conversation was a bit like fishing, like sitting on a sloping bank above a stream, letting one’s lure drift with the current, lulling a wary trout into biting. The key to catching that trout was a curious paradoxical stance of outward idleness over hidden readiness to act.

The boy hung his head. “She can’t because I’m a bad word.”

“A bad word? Who told you that?” The wedge of cake was visible now, resting on Robin’s knee. The breeze fluttered the brown paper. Robin held it steady and reached into his pocket for the iron rod he so often found useful.

“John footman,” the boy admitted.

A spurt of anger made Robin press the iron rod down hard through the cake, dividing it in two. “But not your sister Phoebe. Lady Phoebe never said that.”

Robin waited some time for the answer to come. When it did, it was a no , in a small voice, without the earlier bravado. Robin pressed his advantage.

“Nor Nanny Fellows, nor Mrs. Kendall. You left Nanny in the park. She worried.” It might be unfair, but Robin let the idea sink in. After a pause, he asked, “Do you ever eat cake?”

“Every day,” was the defiant answer, the bravado back. “Are you a bad man?”

“What makes you think so?”

The boy shrugged. “Agnes says bad men offer things to boys, and to never take cake from them.”

“Does Agnes like cake?” The cake was heavy and at least a day old, the currants had sunk during baking to a band at the bottom. It was nothing like the light little cakes with spun sugar decorations at Marchmont House. Still, Robin had been thinking that he would enjoy his half when the time came. Now it was clear that he’d need the other half of the cake for Agnes. If he wanted to extract Andrew from hiding, Robin would have to save Agnes as well. He began to wrap the paper back around the divided cake.

“Wait!” Andrew cried. “You’re not going to eat it.”

“You and Agnes could share if you take me to her.”

A mulish expression was the reply. Robin tucked the cake back into his pocket and picked up the coin.

“Wait, who are you?” the boy asked.

Robin stood. “I’m Jones. Your sister Lady Phoebe asked me to find you. She brought me your note and your coin. You wrote that note, didn’t you? Lady Phoebe has been hunting the bad men who have been looking for you.”

“I can’t take you to Agnes. I can’t break my promise.”

“Can you bring her to me? Somewhere safe for her? Do you know Moody’s?”

The boy nodded. “But if we come, will you hurt her?”

The question was agonized. Robin gathered that Agnes had been beaten at some time.

He took a deep breath and got down to the boy’s height. “I will take you both to a secret house that’s safe, where a princess lives with her children. There’s a strong man there, who can protect you against all bad men. I will bring Lady Phoebe to you there. She wants to see you more than anything.”

“You won’t hurt Agnes.”

“No one will hurt Agnes or you, Andrew, and you shall have your cake and your coin. You will make Lady Phoebe happy.”

“I might come. But you can’t stop me now. You look away now.”

Robin turned. It took an effort of will to let the boy go, to trust that something, the coin or the cake or the reminders of his sister’s love would bring him to Moody’s.